Apple Silicon (Mac M1) Support
In 2020 Apple announced that they would be transitioning to their custom silicon for Mac devices.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-transition-to-apple-silicon/
Adobe Dimension should run on these devices.
David Tham
shared this idea
With the announcement of the new Substance 3D Collection, I’m happy to be able to provide more insight into the plans for the future again.
The team has been hard at work building Adobe Substance 3D Stager – which is an evolution on the concept of Dimension as a professional grade staging application with new depth and workflow possibilities.
At the moment neither Dimension nor Stager run on Apple Silicon M1 devices.
We sincerely apologize for the impact to your work thus far or for those who have been unable to try these tools. With Stager now released, getting emulation mode running as soon as possible a top priority.
We will be prioritizing investigations for M1 emulation in Stager first. Support for Dimension is an unknown at this time.
I will provide updates as this topic moves forward.
121 comments
-
Student 01 Lab9 academy
commented
Just like the story with Adobe Muse, this is disrespectful and a shot in Adobe's own foot !
-
Petra Kovács
commented
I need dimension on M1 chipset. That will be really useful for my workflow too..I didn't choose Adobe because I couldn't work at the end.... It's really cheeky..
-
Ali Saidaminkhanoff
commented
Hi! Is there any news?
-
Alex Restuccia
commented
+1 for Dimension or Stager on M1
-
Krishna Kumar Alath
commented
we need dimension on M1 chipset. that will be really useful for our workflow
-
Steve Hanff
commented
Rendering on an M1 Air is fine, I do it in Blender ;)
However I think Stager will be more interesting once that M1x or M2 comes out with more GPU power.
-
ussnorway na
commented
Apple Mac just doesn't put any effort into Gpu and only cares about the Cpu... making a computer with both Gpu and Cpu is something Microsoft Windows brings to the table and that is why its often called a gaming system
doing any streaming, capture, rendor or ray tracing on a Mac is like running a race with only one leg and watching Mac-fans hop would be funny if it wasn't so sad
-
Philipp Haunstetter
commented
"We sincerely apologize for the impact to your work thus far or for those who have been unable to try these tools. With Stager now released, getting emulation mode running as soon as possible a top priority."
Are you going to get Stager and the other Apps running natively on Apple Silicon so that Stager can profit of the massive performance Apple Silicon is providing or will there be "only" emulated apps for the next years?
-
I would agree in general that doing 3D rendering on an Air is going to kill your device probably. Supporting Silicon devices in general we want to do, but our minimum requirements remain a Mac Book Pro grade device.
-
Sveinbjorn Palsson commented
This is completely off topic:
@晓林 吴 I do not think that everyone dislikes china because they don't take holidays. In fact, I didn't know this was the case. Americans don't take holidays either. American companies may chose to, but their system and culture isn't very friendly to workers rights. Europeans look at these cultures and, well, worry. It does not seem very healthy. But that is all. American companies with extensive holidays usually do that to accommodate European workers, who are used to that.
As far as the heat dissipation issue with the Air: I think that's why you shouldn't buy it. I paid more for my MBP especially for the fans - because I do high-intensity computing tasks like 3d rendering and complex music software. My Macs always make fan noise. So I know I need the fans. And this isn't the case with everyone. Most graphic design isn't processor intensive anymore. Photoshop work is just short spurts of computing, layout only moves past that when you are exporting large pdfs. But anything with rendering shouldn't be done on an Air. It's probably a wonder of engineering as far as heat management goes, but buying the machine with the fans is just not all that more expensive, and it exists just for this reason. -
晓林 吴
commented
In fact, I have always been curious about how to solve the heat dissipation problem of Macbook Air M1 --- it does not have a fan. Anyone who understands understands, that the rendering of a large-size picture may take an hour. Can Air M1 survive? (P.S. we Chinese never take vacations except for the 7 days of the Spring Festival, including elementary school students. Holidays just mean working days without overtime pay. This may be why everyone dislike China, include ourselves. Ugh)
-
ussnorway na
commented
@R Taylor Photoshop fails to detect your M1 because there was no such thing back when the script was made and since you don't have a compatible chip it disables 3D... this is by design
nothing to do with Dimension but yes getting anything (not just 3D) to work with new chipsets takes time and effort which isn't always considered a good investment because it may not work out
-
Yeah this is total clarity I'd say. Hard to fault this.
Thank you Jeanette.
-
Michael Kuzyk
commented
As a former software Product Manager, this is a really honest and fair answer. Thank you for the honesty and transparency.
-
So what I can say is that we did some initial effort trying to get Dimension to work on M1 emulation mode. A few engineers took a few weeks but there were some issues with the rendering engine working. Because of the time it was taking and the launch of Stager being a hard date (since it was part of a coordinated effort with multiple other apps and teams with a whole new offer) we didn't have a lot of flexibility with the Stager schedule and needed to drop the M1 work for Dimension to finish Stager.
Our team is primarily based in US which Adobe has an annual summer holiday so the entire team is on break for two weeks. When we get back in mid-July we have planning phases and M1 is marked as the highest priority topic.
However, the time for getting it working is still unknown. We did a few weeks before and had gotten stuck, and now we have to figure out how to do it for two apps. Stager and Dimension share SOME code base, but they are separate apps so we have to do it twice.
The issue last time had been in the rendering engine, but Stager has a completely new rendering engine, so it could be different work for each app.
I'll know more about how the conversation is going in July when we're back from break and digging into the topic!
I wish I could give a better time estimate, but I'd say late 2021 is the earliest we'd be looking at. Assuming July-August-September for investigations and work. And I don't know yet whether that would be Stager first or Stager/Dimension together.
I hope this adds some color to the conversation at least, if not much comfort, which I'm sorry for.
-
Thanks for the input Jeanette. I understand that you need to keep product announcements under wraps, but any insights like these help us put things into perspective. "Prioritizing investigations for M1 emulation" is stil a vague descriptor though. I'm prioritizing a few things that I'm still not working on, but I just feel more guilty about neglecting those than others.
The language still doesn't really confirm that anything can be expected. One can imagine a lot of scenarios still. Adobe is not the only company adrift on the seas of Apple Silicon, so is Native Instrument with their flagship Massive X music software synthesizer.
The worst thing I can imagine is that Apple will fix this in the next generation of hardware, which would leave us with a very unwise hardware investnment. While this would not be Adobe's fault (or indeed NI's), and NDAs would not let any developers tell clients about this, a lot can be gleaned just by honest descriptions on how development is coming along, if it's likely to land or, as you say, something to "investigate".
It's very understandable that you avoid promises. So I would not expect to get solid timelines.
But anything that help us imagine what is going on could push aside the more lively scenarios one imagines when things get weird and information is scarce.Also, it'd be nice if something would be done for us, once everything is figured out.A few months of special trial of the new software might smooth things over very well. Just saying :)
-
Sidanshu Bali
commented
When can we expect Substance 3d stager for Mac M1
-
I wouldn't say that. Ps3D is a completely different code base and tech stack. Photoshop's team has their own roadmap and we haven't worked with them on this. For Dimension/Stager we actually did some work on trying to port Dimension at the beginning of the year but ran into issues getting the rendering engine specifically to work. We use a different rendering engine, so I'd say any new work we're doing for Dimension/Stager is separate from work for Ps3D.
-
R Taylor
commented
I've just noticed that 3D doesn't seem to work in Photoshop on Apple Silicon either. Are you having problems getting 3D to work at all on the M1 chip?
-
Fares Alharthi
commented
"The team has been hard at work building Adobe Substance 3D Stager " so what you’re saying is thank you for waiting..... BUT we didn’t even try to make Dimension run on Apple Silicon M1 devices because you’re working on another software that’s not even going to run on the m1 devices and on top of all that we should pay more hhhhhh